INDEX OF QUOTES
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Drawing on interviews with 52 women married to men who had been fired, Jukes and Rosenberg trace the emotional roller coaster ride that individual family members encounter as they struggle to make sense of the complex and often conflictual emotions that surface during a crisis. Practical strategies are put forward on how to enlist all family members in the job search process, but of particular interest from the professional helping perspective are the descriptions of the stages of adjustment that individuals and families go through and the prescriptions the authors put forward for coping with, and surmounting, the crisis associated with job loss. The focus may be on spousal relationships but the book reinforces the point that certain stages of emotional and psychological adjustment are almost universal in their application to different expressions of loss associated with personal life events — stages reflecting a plethora of emotions encompassing feelings of shock, disbelief, and betrayal, isolation, anger, bewilderment, shame and embarrassment, guilt, profound disappointment, anxiety and fear, vulnerability, loss, depression, helplessness, stress, fantasies of revenge, fantasies of magical solutions, etc. (1991, p. 8). Because each family member is likely to display a unique pattern of response to job loss experienced by a primary breadwinner, it behooves us as helping professionals, who may connect with families in different contexts, to develop the skill to pick up on the nuances of behaviour that reflect stress in the family. Because our focus is on children and youth in distress, it may take some digging about before the precipitating events become apparent when, for example, defiant or acting out behaviour escalates, or a child withdraws and school performance begins to suffer. All too often the troubling behaviour of the child or youth is simply the "tip of the iceberg" that can, for a time, divert attention from the real root of the problem. And even then, what might be construed as the real root of the problem may simply reflect a triggering event that exposes a much more complex fragility in the relationships of a given family. The message here, of course, is that we must become much more astute and cautious about ascribing simple explanations to complex problems presented by clients. |
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Jukes, J. and Rosenberg, R. (1991) I've been fired too! Coping with your husband’s job loss. Toronto: Stoddart